Re: [Isms] d) was dublin isms meeting minutes

[Randy Presuhn <randy_presuhn at mindspring.com>]

Hi -

>From: Juergen Schoenwaelder <j.schoenwaelder at jacobs-university.de>
>Sent: Sep 3, 2008 5:45 PM
>To: Ira McDonald <blueroofmusic at gmail.com>
>Cc: isms at ietf.org
>Subject: Re: [Isms] d) was dublin isms meeting minutes
>
>On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 12:29:00PM -0400, Ira McDonald wrote:
> 
>> The vast majority of uses of SnmpAdminString in IETF and private MIBs
>> are for simple description objects that need to be internationalized - no
>> normalization is needed - string comparisons would be a design flaw.
>
>SnmpAdminStrings are used as identifiers in several places in SNMPv3
>MIB modules and these strings are compared during the processing in
>the elements of procedure. Are you saying SNMPv3's usage of UTF-8 is
>flawed? Perhaps it is, but to be fair it must be noted that SNMPv3 was
>done about 10 years ago and UTF-8 normalization was probably not that
>well understood at that point in time.

The issue was raised when SnmpAdminString was being defined,
and has popped up a couple of times since, but
the WG hasn't wanted to deal with it.  (It's not *that*
hard, but life would be simpler if we had just dealt
with it from the beginning.)

>If SNMPv3's usage of UTF-8 is flawed, someone should write up a
>document explaining the issue and proposing ways to fix things and
>then it can be discussed if and where in the IETF this work should be
>done.  Looking at the current ISMS charter, I don't think ISMS is the
>place to do this.

Given the way SNMP works in general (get-next, etc.) I think the best
we can do at this point is to advise that the party generating a string
in the first place (e.g., a manager creating an index value or setting
a string) is responsible for normalizing (we should say which normalization
form to use).  If the agent is to enforce normalization constraints,
that should be included in the DESCRIPTION of the relevant object-types.

To set an object to a potentially non-normalized value, and to
have the agent automagically normalizing it, is asking for
trouble, especially with INDEXes

Randy
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